The Limit
From the editor.
John Podhoretz 2012-06-01Since same-sex marriage emerged as an issue in the early 1990s, brilliant conservative thinkers have constructed a remarkable series of arguments against it. There are sociological, anthropological, biological, psychological, teleological, and hermeneutical arguments. What unites all these arguments is an underlying belief that certain limits must be placed on human behavior for society to function and for people to lead productive and meaningful lives. This is what traditionalism is.
Proponents of gay marriage have a much simpler argument: Two consenting adults should be free to do whatever they want. The core belief here is libertarian—that it is a fundamental injustice to place limits on human conduct. If homosexuals wish to marry, then marry they should. If “marriage” has always been limited to the joining of a man and a woman, then its definition should change because such a limit is unfair.
The simplicity of the argument is its greatest strength. And what the progress of the gay-marriage debate reveals is that we are all libertarians now—but within limits, of course. For example, Barack Obama has come out as a libertarian on gay marriage, but is very nearly the opposite of a libertarian when it comes to economic matters. Many of those who wept and celebrated on May 9 when the president announced he was a supporter of gay marriage have not blinked an eye as states and municipalities have limited the rights of smokers and property owners, for example.
The growing libertarianism of the United States is the reason a change in law opposed by 80 percent of the public 15 years ago is now a 50-50 proposition—or at least as far as polling goes. And it’s why the endorsement of gay marriage by the president of the United States is far more a reflection of that sea change in attitudes than a sea change in itself. Everybody knew Obama was lying in 2008 when he said he was opposed to gay marriage. He was given a pass by gay advocates because they knew he was on their side and they also knew open advocacy of their cause might harm his bid for the presidency. Now, for reasons that surely include the need to loosen some purse strings he found surprisingly hard to open this year, Obama has stopped lying for political gain and instead has told the truth for political gain.
Which is not to say he did something risk-free. His remarks came the day after voters in North Carolina went to the polls and, in a landslide vote, affirmed the traditional definition of marriage. Which is what always happens, it appears, when voters are asked to express an opinion at the polls. “There have been 31 statewide ballot initiatives on same-sex marriage since 1998,” writes Rod Dreher. “And proponents have lost every single time. Every. Single. Time.”
Traditionalists argue that these public referenda suggest the tide can be turned and the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage can be reversed. But there is a reason that the tide has been flowing in the direction it has, a reason why there has been so little resistance to the growing moral libertarianism of the American people. And that is the crisis within traditionalism itself. Faith traditions and august institutions that had been designed to uphold the age-old pillars of society grew besotted with the possibilities of wholesale social change. By confusing their own fashionable politics with timeless truths, they ceased speaking with authority.
So, yes, marriage will be redefined. And this is the greatest irony of all. The gay-rights movement has been dedicated to “liberation.” But marriage is defined by the limits it sets on your personal freedom. You pledge to be faithful, which limits your sexual freedom. You promise to take care of someone else, which limits your freedom of mobility. You form a unit with someone else, which limits your economic freedom. And you are legally obliged to take fiscal, emotional, and legal responsibility for the children you have together for nearly two decades.
Marriage knits two people into a web of obligation that grows tighter, more complex, and more limiting over time. You surrender freedom. What you get in exchange is richness, depth, transcendental meaning. Which raises the question: Can a liberation movement give up liberation as an end in itself?

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The Limit
Must-Reads from Magazine
Is It 1968?
David Frum 2016-08-16
s it 1968 ALL OVER again? To the extent the Trump campaign for president has an organizing principle, that has become the organizing principle.
“I think what Nixon understood is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first,” Trump told an interviewer for the New York Times on the eve of his convention in Cleveland. “The ’60s were bad, really bad. And it’s really bad now. Americans feel like it’s chaos again.”
In almost every measurable way, the United States is a more stable and peaceful country in 2016 than it was in 1968. That was a year of war abroad and crime at home; of the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King—and of the spasm of urban rioting after King’s killing. One hundred and twenty-five American cities were wracked by violence in April 1968. Tens of thousands of troops were required to quell the rioting: not only National Guard, but regular Army, too. Dozens of people were killed. Hundreds were arrested. Thousands were injured. Damage to property neared $400 million in today’s money.
Nineteen sixty-eight was also a year of profound political crisis. A sitting president—winner of 61 percent of the popular vote less than four years before—was forced from office by his own party. That party—the dominant party in U.S. politics for a third of a century—now ripped itself to pieces in fierce internal battles. Having won six of the previous eight presidential elections, losing only to the hero of D-Day in 1952 and 1956, it would stagger on to defeat in five of the next six.
Behind the crisis in politics loomed a larger crisis in authority of all kinds, especially academic and intellectual authority. The civil-rights challenge to segregation and white supremacy—followed by student protests against the Vietnam War—together rekindled radical politics in the United States. What happened next is the stuff of a thousand histories, memoirs, and documentaries.
Yet in all the chaos, the United States had one great resource then that it lacks today: a functioning conservative party. To be sure, the Republicans of the late 1960s were not yet the “movement conservative” party they would later become. But they were an institutionally conserving party: a party that believed there was more in the United States that was deserving of protection than in need of change. President Richard Nixon expressed that conservatism in his first inaugural address in 1969: “No people has ever been so close to the achievement of a just and abundant society, or so possessed of the will to achieve it. And because our strengths are so great, we can afford to appraise our weaknesses with candor and to approach them with hope.”
Under the pressures of economic uncertainty, demographic change, family dissolution, and war, the old silent majority has become a fearful, angry plurality.Against a surging political left that radically critiqued everything—not only the free-enterprise system and the U.S.-led world order, but everything in American life from suburban housing (“little boxes, made of ticky-tacky,” as the song went) to the cop on the beat (“off the pigs!”)—the Republican party of Richard Nixon upheld established rules and existing norms without surrendering to despair about the future. Against a left that championed “the poor, the black, and the young,” Nixon led a party, to borrow a phrase of Ben Wattenberg’s, of the “unpoor, the unblack, and the unyoung.”
These people weren’t reactionaries opposed to all change. Quite the opposite. Between 1969 and the November 1974 elections that broke the Nixon coalition’s power in Congress, the United States passed the most important of the environmental laws that to this day protect the air, water, and endangered species. The Nixon administration actively desegregated schools and founded the affirmative-action system to counter racial discrimination. With this agenda, President Nixon gained re-election with 61 percent of the vote, up from 43 percent in 1968.
His voters understood that the change Nixon backed was change intended to sustain the system, not overturn it. “Just as we cannot have progress without order, we cannot have order without progress,” Nixon told the 1968 Republican convention. Among the statesmen Nixon admired most was Benjamin Disraeli, the inventor of “Tory Democracy.” Disraeli’s government widened the British franchise in 1867 on the bet that bringing more people into politics would stabilize society. Through two world wars and the convulsions that brought Communism and Fascism to continental Europe, Disraeli’s bet proved sound. Nixon sought to replicate it.
There was another way that the 1960s were different from our era: It was a time of broadly shared prosperity when the tone of society was set by the middle class, not the very rich (when in fact there was almost no such thing, by our contemporary standards, as “the very rich”). It was a time of ethnic homogeneity, when the grandchildren of the Great Migration of the 19th century had bubbled into the melting pot of Americanism, and religious differences had faded into near meaninglessness. There was black and there was white, and the latter group was so big and broad that it could be challenged to share its advantages with the former without significant harm to itself. Most important as a matter of politics, Nixon could reasonably and rightly look to a great “silent majority” (as he called it in a famous 1969 speech) of middle-class Americans to back his goals abroad and at home. And they hearkened to him.
It was a time during which America was still impelled by grand national ambition. Richard Nixon cautioned his fellow Americans against imagining that poverty could be eradicated in a single term, or even two, but the ultimate eradication of poverty was a goal not only widely shared, but also widely regarded as feasible. The Nixon administration would experiment with a guaranteed annual income as a way to realize this aim. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had notoriously discussed the crisis in the black family, but in the almost 90 percent of American society that was not black, both marriage and married parenthood seemed robust and growing steadily more so.
No longer. Under the pressures of economic uncertainty, demographic change, family dissolution, and war, the old silent majority has become a fearful, angry plurality. Three-quarters of white voters saw the country on the wrong track in the spring of 2016. These feelings are most intense among Donald Trump supporters. A March Pew survey found that 50 percent of Trump voters called themselves angry with government, as compared with 30 percent of Ted Cruz’s supporters, and only 18 percent of John Kasich’s.
It’s not just about economics. Even during the Great Depression, life expectancy improved for Americans. But over the past generation, non-college-educated white Americans have begun to live less long, their chances blighted by addiction, obesity, and suicide. The voting base of the Republican Party not only feels, but actually is, itself under lethal pressure from social change.
Rapid demographic change has led less wealthy white Americans to feel themselves in danger of displacement and dispossession by competing races and ethnicities. The American Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that nearly 75 percent of self-identified Trump supporters feel that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” Sixty-nine percent of Trump voters, according to that same survey, regard immigration as a crucial issue for themselves personally. A plurality of white working-class Americans—almost half—believe the country’s best days are behind it.
Republican primary voters were not moved by the usual appeals. In 2016, as in every election since 1980, Republicans in the Reagan line presented themselves as candidates of optimism. “I am more confident than ever that despite our troubles, we have it within our power to make our time another American Century.” So said Senator Marco Rubio, launching his campaign in April 2015. Over the course of the campaign year, however, that music grew fainter and more uncertain. Eleven months later, as Donald Trump neared the nomination, House Speaker Paul Ryan pleaded for something better: “Politics can be a battle of ideas, not insults. It can be about solutions. It can be about making a difference. It can be about always striving to do better.” And the country “can be a confident America, where we have a basic faith in politics and leaders.”
The forced optimism of politicians bumped into the grim pessimism of voters, who were seduced by the despairing message of Donald Trump. “The American dream is dead,” Trump declared in his announcement in June 2015. His campaign plumbed the vocabulary of failure. The military is a “disaster.” Leaders are “so stupid.” NATO is “obsolete.” Trade deals are “horrible.” The political system is “rigged.” Police are “executed” by Black Lives Matter. “Crime, terrorism, and lawlessness” haunt the land.
Only the most radical measures could save so miserable a country. We must end NATO guarantees, repudiate debts, rip up trade deals, ban religious groups from the country. We must impose order by any means necessary—above all, by concentrating power in the hands of the single man who “alone” can save us.
As one man’s program, all this is sinister enough. But it is not one man’s program. For the most astonishing thing about the Trump candidacy—the thing that politicians and pundits and historians will for years struggle to understand—is how broadly it commanded assent, or at least earned some kind of grudging fealty, in what for convenience sake we’ll still call the conservative world.
Once he had secured his party’s nomination, Trump carried with him the organized apparatus of the Republican institutions. He carried the planners and funders of the Cleveland convention and the 2016 campaign. He carried talk radio and Fox News. He carried conservative evangelicals like Ralph Reed and Northeastern moderates like Rudy Giuliani. He carried with him people who detested his ideas and distrusted him.
It was only the dissenters who found themselves isolated and condemned: Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz and the band of writers and thinkers who adopted the “NeverTrump” hashtag. “Everybody who bought the timeshare is mad at the guy who walked out of the sales presentation,” I tweeted on the night Ted Cruz urged delegates to “vote your conscience” and was showered with boos orchestrated by convention managers. But that was only part of the story. Trump’s message carried the day because so many were already prepared to accept it.
The American conservative movement has long been tinged with apocalyptic rhetoric. “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” So said Ronald Reagan in his famous speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964. “America is drawing perilously close to a tipping point that has the potential to curtail free enterprise, transform our government, and weaken our national identity in ways that may not be reversible,” echoed Paul Ryan in 2011.But in the past, that apocalypse was a conditional apocalypse, ringed about with “if”s and “unless”es. The dark, threatening fate was what might be, not what must be, much less what is.
By Year Eight of the Obama presidency, however, the conditional clauses had ceased to operate. If Barack Obama was “the first anti-American president,” as Newt Gingrich called him in March 2016, how to explain that American voters had twice elected him by thumping margins? Perhaps the country had been hijacked. But after so many years of unsuccessfully demanding “I want my country back,” conservatives could no longer escape the thought: Maybe the hostile hands outnumbered the hands of the legitimate Americans.
The work that preoccupied people of conservative temperament after 1968 is work that calls again:to defend this country’s institutions, alliances, conventions, and Constitution against all challengers.One of the favorite memes of the so-called alt-right is the “red pill,” from the movie The Matrix. To swallow the red pill is to be liberated from the pleasing illusion that one lives in a thriving, happy country—and to awaken to the hideous truth that one is deceived and exploited, a captive in a ruined land. Trump ran the first red-pill presidential campaign—a campaign whose central theme was the brokenness of the American experiment. It is a theme that will only grow more powerful to its believers should Trump lose.
“We are a country that doesn’t win anymore,” said Donald Trump in his speech opposite the January 28, 2016, Republican debate. “We don’t win anymore. When was the last time we won? We don’t win on trade. We don’t win on the military. We don’t beat ISIS. We don’t do anything. We’re not good.”
Instead: “They’re laughing at us,” says Donald Trump—more than 100 times in total over his career in public life, according to a tally kept by the Washington Post.
How to regain respect? The Chinese Communists showed the way: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Trump said. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak . . . as being spit on by the rest of the world.” Trump’s other role model is, of course, Vladimir Putin, the leader he most admires.
The alt-right, the online mini-movement that backs Trump while hurling anti-Semitic imprecations at everyone who might doubt his greatness, is characterized by a reverse nationalism, in which sometimes Russia, sometimes Hungary, sometimes the Hohenzollern monarchy becomes the object of perverted patriotism. Their own mongrel country and its flaccid Constitution receive only disdain. While the content of this ideology remains marginal in American life, its alienation from its own country comes ever closer to the center of politics.
Isn’t that the central story of the Trump campaign? Only some Americans qualify as full Americans—and loyalty is owed not to the America that is, but to a false memory of America as it was and a sinister vision of the purged and purified America that could be, if only we can exclude enough people who don’t truly belong.
What to do?
In the years after 1968, many of those who had started in political life as liberals discovered that they had inherited an unexpected new political mission: to defend the institutions of American life against a radical critique of the country and its institutions. Not necessarily conservative in any ideological sense, they undertook a conservative role in politics: to defend an admittedly imperfect but still precious national experiment against the utopian fantasies of the left. That work helped establish conservatism in the broadest sense of that word as the dominant politics of the next generation.
We have entered another revolutionary moment. But this time, the attack on institutions that have served the country well and kept the peace of the democratic world is coming from a resentful right as well as a radical left. The unexpected origin of this new attack caught many Republican political leaders by surprise and left them soiled and humiliated as they tried to cope, accommodate, and ultimately survive a political insurrection few of them understand even now.
The work that preoccupied people of conservative temperament after 1968 is work that calls again after 2016: To defend this country’s institutions, alliances, conventions, and Constitution against all challengers—whether they base their challenge on a demand for economic equality or racial hierarchy. It’s possible that a Trump collapse will be so total as to discredit Trump’s candidacy entirely. Possible—but unlikely. George McGovern lost very badly in 1972, but his ideas shaped his party for decades after. So it may be for Trump and Trumpism.
When the verdict is delivered in November, the work does not stop. If anything, that work becomes more demanding and urgent. We of the center-right have learned something alarming about the susceptibility to extremism, not only of American democracy in general, but of our political coalition in particular. We’ve learned something painful about the dwindling relevance of the conservative doctrines of the past generation to the political needs of the present generation. We’ve learned something humbling about the character of many of our own friends and allies in submitting to a charlatan who never even bothered to pretend to be anything else. We’ve learned something ominous about the gathering power of tribalism in a society riven by rapid migration and slowing economic growth.
It’s our test now whether we can put this learning to timely and wise use to defend the American experiment against a dangerous and depressing insurgency by those people—and that party—who so long presented themselves as its most faithful champions. It’s time to take upon ourselves the mission of half a century ago: to mobilize the great conservative-minded American center to rescue the country from its ideological extremes.

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Whose Violence Is It?
The left excused violent protest away when it was ideologically useful to do so. And then came Trump.
Noah Rothman 2016-08-11
olitical violence returned to American political life in 2015 when Donald Trump mobilized and cemented his support by inciting his most unstable devotees to defend his honor with force in his successful campaign for the Republican nomination. Many heeded his calls, and, for months, the fear that Trump’s reckless rhetoric would yield to widespread bloodshed preoccupied the minds of political observers—to the exclusion of the offenses to civic responsibility carried out against him and his supporters.
For at the very same Trump was sowing animosity and inspiring isolated acts of brutality, a coordinated and violent response to Trump went largely ignored.
The counter-savagery of the left against the Trump campaign was not a spontaneous phenomenon. It arose as a paradoxical response to the long-standing effort to conflate controversial speech itself with actual violence, on campuses and elsewhere.
If speech is violence, then it stands to reason that violent resistance to speech you consider violent is therefore permissible simply as a matter of self-defense. Thus has the pursuit of safe spaces and anodyne speech led to their opposites.
Anti-Speech Violence
A mood of impending disaster permeated the streets of Chicago by March 2016. For months, Trump had offered words of support for those at his rallies who attacked protestors inside them. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” the candidate said of one of his protesters. “Take their coats!” he demanded of other anti-Trump demonstrators in January. “Throw them out in the cold.” To the cheers of his supporters, Trump advised his acolytes to “knock the crap” out of his opponents; if they did, he would “pay for the legal fees” resulting from their prosecution. “I promise,” he twice insisted. When word came that his campaign had chosen Chicago as a site for a major rally, students at the nearby University of Illinois at Chicago responded to the challenge posed by Trump and organized a demonstration against him.
Trump’s planned rally in downtown Chicago wasn’t the first of his events to be targeted by progressive protesters, but this was no ordinary protest. They chanted their mission statement as they marched down Chicago’s streets: “Shut s*** down.” These protesters, many of whom expressed their unambiguous support for the socialist Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, sought to present as menacing a presence as possible to intimidate pro-Trump rally attendees and to force the candidate to cancel his event. Police officers were attacked. Two officers were injured, and one was hit in the head with a bottle. Out of prudence, event organizers postponed the rally indefinitely.
“I’ve never been more proud of my city,” 25-year-old protester Maria Hernandez told CNN’s reporters, who described her as dancing with merriment at the news that Trump’s rally was cancelled. Media outlets broadcast video featuring hundreds of progressive protesters chanting “We stopped Trump” in celebration.
While there was some rote condemnation of both the Trump and Sanders supporters who did not assemble peacefully, the press and the field of Republican presidential candidates alike largely responded to this event by condemning Trump. Only as the violence intensified was it unambiguously shown largely to be the one-sided work of anti-Trump protesters.
Five weeks later, more than 20 people were arrested outside of a Trump rally in Costa Mesa, California. Hundreds of protesters blocked traffic, drove recklessly, and wrecked a police cruiser in the effort to shut down yet another pro-Trump gathering. Four weeks after that, a Trump campaign event in San Jose, California, was also marred by violence when event-goers were attacked by anti-Trump demonstrators. They burned the American flag while flying the Mexican national banner. They pelted attendees with eggs, tore the clothing off the backs of attendees, and left one of their targets bleeding profusely from the face and head. Some rally-goers fought back, but the video footage of the event shows that most did not. The attacks were so unambiguous that they led to a response from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta: “Violence against supporters of any candidate has no place in this election,” he wrote. Podesta was clearly worried that these attacks on Trump supporters could be interpreted as acts of support for Clinton.
Victimhood is now currency. As the immutable law dictates, the demand for victim status has necessitated a commensurate increase in its supply.In June, a group of “white nationalists” who had described themselves as emboldened by Trump’s campaign descended on Sacramento for a licensed march. They, too, were targeted by violent protesters. In the ensuing clash, in which both groups were armed with knives, rocks, bottles, and clubs, ten people were injured—two of them critically. Video of the event reveals a pitched battle in which one mob was pitted against the other. The anti-Trump organizers of that attack—activists who described themselves as “anti-fascists”—made their intentions clear: They were attempting a violent dispersal so that the admittedly noxious members of the white-nationalist group could not assemble and speak freely in the public square.
“White supremacists should not be entitled to ‘free speech’ to preach their hateful messages and incite beatings and murders,” declared a piece at the socialist outlet Liberation News. “No ‘Free Speech’ for Fascists,” averred Bradley Allen, a photojournalists and one of the melee’s attendees and participants. An organizer of the event, Yvette Felarca, described it as a “victory” in the struggle against fascists. “They were met with a huge crowd that was there, committed and determined, very courageous, to take action, shut them down, and stop them from organizing for genocide and for lynch mobs,” she insisted. “The Nazis did not recruit anyone new today, and our side did.”
The vast majority of media coverage of the melee in Sacramento devoted more time to educating the nation about the supremacist group that organized the protest than those who planned and initiated the violence. Detailed reporting on the event from local outlets like the Sacramento Bee, however, suggested that the assault on rally-goers was the premeditated work of the “anti-fascist” counter protesters and that it had been anticipated by the “white nationalist” group they targeted.
What They Mean by ‘What’s Right’
For an unacceptably large number of progressive activists, a violent response to speech has not only become excusable but obligatory. Such undemocratic behavior is the natural outgrowth of an increasingly mainstream progressive worldview in which the distinctions between speech and violence have been blurred beyond recognition.
Central to the ethos of a new class of progressive activist is the notion that “hate speech” can be traumatic, and not in a figurative sense. They contend that this trauma is not different from genuine physical violence. The conflation of speech with violence has resulted in the acceptance of real violence as an equivalent of free speech.
“When someone calls a black person the ‘n’ word out of hatred, he or she is not expressing a new idea or outlining a valuable thought,” read a 2012 op-ed in the Harvard Crimson. “They are committing an act of violence. When asked in a 2015 survey if “choosing to use or not use certain words can constitute an act of violence,” 53 percent of respondents ages 18–24 either “somewhat” or “strongly” agreed. Matriculated students, particularly those who affiliate with the activist left, have been taught to treat speech with which they disagree as literally a physical ordeal.
That remarkably authoritarian impulse has found supportive voices among some equally tyrannical administrators. One of the more egregious recent examples of a tendency toward the repression of discomfiting speech was orchestrated by former University of Missouri assistant professor of mass media, Melissa Click. During a November 2015 campus protest in support of racial equality, Click sought to enforce what she clearly thought was some kind of implicit prohibition on journalism. “You need to get out,” she barked at a reporter who was armed with a video camera. “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?” she asked when the reporter declined to stop filming the demonstration on a taxpayer-funded campus. “I need some muscle over here.”
After months of process and procedure, Click was let go from the University of Missouri for misconduct, but you’d be hard pressed to find a Democrat who would approve of the school’s decision. When asked in a February 2016 survey if they agreed that “before a corporate owned media entity covers a campus rally for racial equality, they should first prove that they are not biased against the content of the rally,” 67 percent of Democrats said yes.
The marketplace of thought and philosophy has itself come to be seen as tainted with bigotry by a terrifyingly effective set of aspiring censors. In recent years, the twisted logic that confuses mental stress with physical pain has led a perpetually aggrieved caste of activists to bully those who do not share their worldview into hiding.
In the last two years alone, anti–“hate speech” activists have prevented Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Condoleezza Rice from addressing the colleges to which they were invited because of their views on Islam, feminism, and foreign affairs respectively. Sommers, in particular, had her reputation viciously attacked for having the temerity to question the statistics that suggest an increase in on-campus sexual assault (although she is far from the only analyst asking those questions).
“Giving voice to someone who argues that statistics on sexual assault exaggerate the problem and condemns reputable studies for engaging in ‘statistical hijinks’ serves only to trigger obstructive dialogue and impede the progress of the university’s commitment to providing increased resources to survivors,” read an editorial in Georgetown University’s Hoya protesting Sommers. You could be forgiven for thinking “obstructive dialogue” is a rather fancy way of saying “shut up.”
The desire to appropriate the moral righteousness conferred upon a victim of legitimate violence is evident in the “safe space” movement, whose very name represents an attempt to co-opt the suffering of legitimate victims. According to Christina Hanhardt, associate professor of American and LGBT studies at the University of Maryland, the “safe space” rose out of the mid-20th century gay and lesbian community’s efforts to create neighborhoods free from discrimination, bigotry, and violence. It is particularly hypocritical for the socially progressive left, which is especially sensitive to the invented scourge of “cultural appropriation,” to ignore the fact that a legacy of harassment endured by an earlier generation of gays and lesbians has been commandeered by young adults in the cushiest of imaginable environments.
Victimhood is currency. As the immutable law dictates, the demand for victim status has necessitated a commensurate increase in its supply.
Speech as Violence, Violence as Speech
The arbitrary disregard for the distinction between free expression and incitement was most unashamedly on display following the attack on Charlie Hebdo in January of 2015.
“Charlie Hebdo weren’t asking to be shot,” the Daily Beast’s Arthur Chu graciously conceded. “They were asking for a reaction, though, and for half a century now they’ve been surviving pretty much on the notoriety of constantly trying to provoke a reaction.” He added that the 12 who died in Hebdo’s offices should not be remembered as martyrs. “I’ve already seen what happens when you get a culture that, rather than asking to what end we defend free speech, valorizes free speech for its own sake and thus perversely values speech more the more pointlessly offensive it is.”
Chu wasn’t alone. “Charlie Hebdo has a long record of mocking, baiting and needling French Muslims,” wrote Financial Times columnist Tony Barber. “If the magazine stops just short of outright insults, it is nevertheless not the most convincing champion of the principle of freedom of speech. France is the land of Voltaire, but too often editorial foolishness has prevailed at Charlie Hebdo.”
Those were not uncommon responses to acts of violence against the magazine from those who define the contours of the democratic dialogue. “Sorry for your loss, Charlie, and there’s no justification of such an illegitimate response to your current edition,” wrote Time magazine’s Paris Bureau Chief Bruce Crumley in response to an attempted firebombing of Hebdo’s offices in 2011. “But do you still think the price you paid for printing an offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient parody on the logic of ‘because we can’ was so worthwhile?”
Months later, after Paris was again struck by Islamist violence, no less a figure than Secretary of State John Kerry stated that the coordinated attack by a pair of gunmen on sites across the city in November 2015, which killed 130 people and wounded hundreds more, was far more senseless than the attack on Hebdo. Kerry said that those who killed cartoonists and writers months earlier had “a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’”
The White House has routinely questioned the prudence of provocative speech lampooning radical Islamist fundamentalists. From the inflammatory YouTube video that the White House said had inspired the murder of four Americans in Benghazi to the satirical drawings of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the Obama administration and its fellow travelers have been quick to note that speaking freely and provocatively has consequences—and, implicitly, that those consequences are in some way deserved.
When on May 3, 2015, two terrorists tried to kill the attendees of a “cartoon drawing” event in Garland, Texas, in solidarity with Hebdo (an attack for which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria claimed credit), MSNBC host Chris Matthews insisted that organizer Pamela Geller was intentionally “provoking,” “taunting,” and “daring” Islamist radicals to commit murder. The Washington Post noted that Geller had strangely refused to apologize for exercising her freedom of speech. “Do you at some level relish being the target of these attacks,” CNN host Erin Burnett asked Geller. “Looks like Pamela Geller will get her wish: More dead Americans at the hands of radical Muslims,” the New York Daily News’s Linda Stasi emoted.
The Western left indulged in a similarly haughty response when a Danish café hosting Jyllands-Posten cartoonist Lars Vilks was attacked by an Islamist gunman weeks later. Before he was targeted by Islamists with bullets, Vilks had been targeted by his fellow Western Europeans—students who attended his by-invitation lecture at Swedish university—with eggs.
It isn’t merely Islamist terrorists who find forgiveness from the left if they claim they were incited to violence by inflammatory acts of free expression. When the clinically demented Jared Lee Loughner killed six people and gravely wounded former Representative Gabrielle Giffords outside of a Tucson supermarket, the nation’s liberal commentators became earnestly convinced that he was some sort of Manchurian Candidate who had been remotely activated by the picture of a target on Sarah Palin’s website.
The improvised bombs that killed three and wounded more than 260 others at the Boston Marathon in 2013 were initially blamed on the day upon which they exploded—Patriots Day, a Massachusetts holiday celebrating the opening battles of the American Revolutionary War. “Obviously, nobody knows anything yet,” Esquire’s Charles Pierce cautioned before noting that Oklahoma City bomber and Midwesterner Timothy McVeigh carried out his bloody act on that same day because “he fancied himself a waterer of the tree of liberty and the like.”
When Robert Lewis Dear Jr. opened fire on an abortion-providing health center in Colorado Springs, reproductive-rights advocates were quick to blame not the shooter but their political opponents. “They have ignited a firestorm of hate. They knew there could be these types of consequences, and yet they ratcheted up the rhetoric,” National Abortion Federation President Vicki Saporta told reporters, many of whom quoted her uncritically. “It’s not a huge surprise that somebody would take this type of action.” Dear was later ruled mentally incompetent and unable to stand trial.
A Moment for Fanaticism
Democrats and liberals had every opportunity to reject debauchery and violence in the name of progressivism in 2011, with the emergence of the so-called Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy’s violent tendencies were out in the open by the fourth week of this protest in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, which had by then created a sensation and resulted in chapters sprouting up in cities all over the world. The movement’s sister encampment in Rome had already exploded in violence by October 2011, when self-described “occupiers” smashed local shop and bank windows, destroyed ATMs, attacked news crews, and set cars alight. In New York, more than 700 protesters were arrested for attempting to shut down the Brooklyn Bridge. None of these signs of trouble were enough to dissuade Democrats from embracing the movement they thought would serve as a kind of Democratic Tea Party.
The transformation of an authoritarian movement into a violent one requires a catalyst. The spark might have arrived in the form of Donald Trump’s ascension.“I support the message to the establishment,” Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said of Occupy. “God bless them for their spontaneity,” she said at a subsequent press conference. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused. And it’s going to be effective.” Barack Obama echoed her: “The protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” In standing with those who “rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street” while speaking at the opening of the Marin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., the president noted that even the famed civil-rights advocate was “vilified by many, denounced as a rabble rouser and an agitator, a communist and a radical.”
Except that, by late October, New York City’s encampment was plagued by accusations of rampant sexual assault and the abuse of minors—accusations the group’s organizers had allegedly sought to cover up to shield the group from bad press. By November, incidents of property destruction and police overtime resulting from the protests were estimated to have cost American cities $6 million and counting.
Acts of violence related to these encampments soon became more organized. In Washington, D.C., an Occupy contingent overpowered a group of security guards and forced their way into the National Air and Space Museum. A riot erupted in Denver in which police were assaulted amid an attempt to break up an Occupy encampment. Five members of a Cleveland branch of the Occupy movement tied eight packages of what they thought were plastic explosives to the supports of an Ohio bridge as part a campaign targeting symbols of “corporate America.” And in Oakland, emboldened by the endorsement of labor unions like the SEIU, the AFL-CIO, the UAW, and the Teamsters, a 3,000-strong mob of protesters stormed a port facility. The rioters broke windows, vandalized buildings, and set fires as they wreaked devastation throughout the largely vacant Oakland ports—all of which was covered closely and approvingly by center-left media outlets.
“We gonna go to war if we got to,” said Melvin Kelley, an Oakland Occupy organizer who linked the mayhem to a long-standing and occasionally violent feud between police and city residents. “We gonna do what we gotta do.” Even the movement’s less overtly militant members had endorsed unorthodox methods to advance their agenda. “If they fire the folks who are unionizing, we can shut them down. Unions can’t legally organize in that way,” said self-styled Occupy Oakland spokesman Boots Riley. “But we can do stuff based on what’s right. Not what’s legal.”
When Politics Turns Violent
Those who watched nervously as the left sought political advantage by irresponsibly equating free expression with acts of physical aggression cautioned that such callous negligence would have grave consequences. “When speech comes to be seen as a form of violence, vindictive protectiveness can justify a hostile, and perhaps even violent, response,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt warned in the Atlantic in September 2015.
Lukianoff and Haidt were echoing a generally bleak view abroad and within intellectual conservative circles that the closing of the American mind would eventually give way to the closing of its fist as well. But transforming an authoritarian movement into a violent one requires a catalyst. That spark might have already arrived in the form of Donald Trump’s ascension.
Donald Trump has tapped into a vein of fanaticism fueled by both cultural anxiety and grievance, and that still may become something more organized and dangerous. Trump’s habit of indulging the sinister impulses of his more radical supporters cannot be abided. But his incitement does not absolve the Republican nominee’s opponents of guilt for legitimizing extremism in their own ranks and overlooking or excusing away the violence done in the name of progressivism.

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The Secret Jews of The Hobbit
From the Middle East to Middle Earth
Meir Soloveichik 2016-08-11
N 1938, THE OXFORD professor J.R.R. Tolkien published a bestselling book featuring wizards, elves, dwarves, kings, queens, and a curious creature for which the story is named: The Hobbit. The novel, which has sold more than 100 million copies since its publication, dramatically expanded the possibilities (and readership) of a genre that would come to be known as fantasy. Tolkien tells of a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, whose utter indifference to adventure is upended by a visit from 13 hirsute dwarves and a wizard named Gandalf.
The dwarves explain to Bilbo that they once lived in a glorious kingdom inside a mighty mountain where the grandfather of their leader Thorin had reigned as king. There they had achieved renown for their talents with gold and jewels. One day, they tell Bilbo, a dragon attacked their mountain, stole their treasure, and left their kingdom in flames. The dwarves had to flee, dispersing throughout the kingdoms of “Middle Earth,” strangers in a strange land. Having left their homeland, they were forced to speak the languages of those among whom they lived, using their native tongue, “Khuzdul,” only among themselves. Yet they never stopped dreaming of their kingdom, never stopped mourning their mountain. They sought to hire this hobbit to help them reclaim what was once theirs. The dwarves introduce this tale with a song, an elegy for their long-lost land:
Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold….
The pines were roaring on the height,
The winds were moaning in the night.
The fire was red, it flaming spread;
The trees like torches blazed with light.
We have, then, a bunch of short, bearded beings exiled from their homeland, who have dreamed forever of returning. They are linked to a place they lost long ago, dwell in other realms throughout the earth, and yet are so profoundly connected to their own kingdom that it remains vivid to them while for others it is a fading memory. There is one tribe that offers a perfect real-world parallel to Tolkien’s dwarves; there is only one nation that has remained existentially linked to the kingdom its people lost long ago even as it mingled among kings and queens and common folk of other lands throughout history: the Jews. In a reflection on Tolkein and the Jews, to which this essay is indebted, Rabbi Jeffrey Sacks notes that the dwarves’ “sorrowful song of longing to return to their homeland might have been lifted from a Middle Earth Kinnot Tisha B’Av”—a reference to the lamentations read by Jews when they mourn the destruction of Jerusalem.
The dwarves of Middle Earth, the central characters of one of the most beloved books of all time, are indeed based on the Jews. This was confirmed by Tolkien himself in a 1971 interview on the BBC: “The dwarves of course are quite obviously, [sic] couldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews?” he asked. “Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.” Similarly, in a letter to his daughter, Tolkien reflected, “I do think of the ‘Dwarves’ like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue.”
To someone like me, who grew up loving The Hobbit, the discovery that Tolkien had based his dwarves on Jews was startling—and the cause of some concern. In reading the book to my son, after learning of its connection to the Jews, the following passage stood out disturbingly:
The most that can be said for the dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor little fellow doing it if he would; but they would all have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it . . . . There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and company, if you don’t expect too much.
Unsettling as the passage is, we would be wrong to use it to indict Tolkien for anti-Semitism. An excerpt from his professional correspondence offers a very different sense of the man’s sympathies. In the late 1930s, a publishing company in Germany sought to create a German translation of The Hobbit. The Germans wrote Tolkien to inquire, among other things, whether he was Aryan. Tolkien drew on his linguistic expertise in composing a biting response:
I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the 18th century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.
Tolkien was clearly horrified by the Nazis’ anti-Semitism and maintained a certain reverence for the Hebraic heritage of the Jewish people.
By the 1940s, several years after the worldwide success of The Hobbit, all of Tolkien’s fears about Germany had been realized. And as countries plunged into war, he began his epic sequel to the book: The Lord of the Rings. In that work, his affection for the Jewish people was more clearly on display. Even as the civilized world united to fight Nazism and Hitler, Tolkien composed a tale that described how the Wizard Gandalf brought together all the peoples of Middle Earth—elves, dwarves, men, hobbits, and others—to defeat the Dark Lord Sauron in his realm, known as Mordor.
Among the members of Gandalf’s group (known as the “Fellowship of the Ring”) are a dwarf named Gimli and an elf named Legolas. Dwarves and elves, Tolkien informs us, had never gotten along. When Gimli and Legolas first meet, each blames this historical ill will on the other’s people. Gandalf, in turn, calls for a truce. “I beg you two, Legolas and Gimli, at least to be friends, and to help me,” he says. “I need you both.” Coaxed by Gandalf, the two ultimately become the best of friends, fighting side by side and risking their lives to defeat the Dark Lord and his evil legions. This dwarf-elf alliance may well be a paradigm of a Jewish-Christian friendship. Interestingly, as Sacks and others have noted, Tolkien’s correspondence during World War II reveals that he himself fell into an unplanned interfaith friendship. Too old to serve in the war, he was asked at Oxford to serve on air-raid duty, keeping watch in order to alert denizens of the university town if there was a bombing and they needed to seek shelter. While on duty, he was paired with one of the most esteemed Jewish historians and Zionists then in Britain. Tolkien wrote:
I was in the small C33 room: very cold and damp. But an incident occurred which moved me and made the occasion memorable. My companion in misfortune was Cecil Roth (the learned Jew historian). I found him charming, full of gentleness (in every sense); and we sat up till after 12 talking. He lent me his watch as there were no going clocks in the place: —and nonetheless himself came and called me at 10 to 7: so that I could go to Communion! It seemed like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world. Actually I was awake, and just (as one does) discovering a number of reasons (other than tiredness and having no chance to shave or even wash), such as the desirability of getting home in good time to open up and un-black and all that, why I should not go. But the incursion of this gentle Jew, and his somber glance at my rosary by my bed, settled it. I was down at St Aloysius at 7.15 just in time to go to Confession before Mass.
So it seems Tolkien shaped the dwarves’ traits and stories to reflect both his own experiences with Jews and their relation to events in the world more generally. Although in The Hobbit he may have indulged in the occasional ugly stereotype, in composing The Lord of the Rings he repented even of this. Thus, the books, the dwarves, and the fictional saga that forever changed the world of literature should inspire not anger but wonder.
The first Hebrew translation of The Hobbit was put forward by some unusual authors in an unusual circumstance: Israeli soldiers who were being held captive by Egypt during the War of Attrition.We should marvel at the fact that an essentially Jewish tale spurred the very birth of modern fantasy, owing to an author who saw in the history of the Jewish people an incredible story. It is a reminder that Jews are indeed part of a wondrous tale, one that we are living today.
The living Jewish story and Tolkien’s fictional saga came together in a remarkable union some 30 years after the publication of The Hobbit. The Jerusalem Post revealed how the first Hebrew translation of the book was put forward by some unusual authors in an unusual circumstance: Israeli soldiers who were being held captive by Egypt during the War of Attrition. “We finished The Hobbit after four months,” said captured pilot, Rami Harpaz, who worked on the translation in a Cairo prison yard with nine other prisoners. “Basically, we became two groups—those who translated and those who read the translation—and for this reason we decided not to translate the trilogy (the first two books plus The Fellowship of the Ring), as it was important to keep the group together as one unit.” The translation, in fact, is not credited to any individual by name but to the group.
How might Jews think of their own story in light of Tolkien’s? The saga of the Jews is that of a miraculous people who longed to reclaim their land and proved themselves great warriors in doing so, thereby fulfilling the Jewish prayers to return to Jerusalem. The very same Jews who prayed with such feeling also pleaded to God with equal sincerity: “May you cause the shoot of David to flower and flourish.” This prayer, of course, is an entreaty for the “return of the king,” of the messianic descendant of David, the shepherd boy who millennia ago was suddenly singled out by Samuel to become an anointed king over Israel and ancestor of an eternal royal dynasty. It was this boy-king who defeated Israel’s enemies and united the fragmented Jewish tribes into one. He made Jerusalem the eternal capital and designed a house of God that his son made into an eternal resting place for the divine. And it was this king whose reign ended and whose royal line was lost for thousands of years. But it was predicted that the Jewish link to the land would not be severed and that ultimately the Jews would return. Genesis 49:10 says: “Lo yasur shevet miyehudah, umechokek mibein raglav had ki yavo shiloh velo yikhas amim; The scepter shall not depart from Judah until Shiloh [the Messiah] shall come, and unto him the nations will gather.”
This is a story more fantastic than any fantasy Tolkien could have composed. And the most important difference between the Jews’ story and his is this: Ours is true. This story is still unfolding, and it is as amazing as the miracles of the Torah we commemorate. Indeed, to be a Jew is to be part of the most miraculous story that ever was. And yet all too often the Jews of modernity have abandoned their miraculous history and its implications for their own age.
In the Jewish Review of Books, Michael Weingrad notes that while modern Jews have played an outsized role in the science-fiction genre, they have composed few fantasy novels. “It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past,” he writes. “It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience.” Jews today are often uncomfortable in the knowledge that they embody the miraculous intervention of the divine in history.
To be a Jew in this age, however, is not merely to be a member of modernity. Seen accurately, the circumstances of our time confirm the enduring odd-defying wonder of Jewish existence. The author Yossi Klein Halevi gets at this when he writes of living in Jerusalem:
I suddenly remember where I am. I feel myself, then, like one of those barefoot and wide-eyed Ethiopian immigrants, silently stepping off the plane at Ben-Gurion Airport into Zion. I recall, too, my father’s wonder at the Wall, whose fragile and improbable endurance he saw as a metaphor for the Jewish people. Like him, I ask myself what it is about this strange little people that continually finds itself at the center of international attention, repeatedly on the front lines against totalitarian forces of evil—Nazism, Soviet Communism, now jihadism—all of which marked the Jews as their primary obstacle to achieving world domination. At those moments, I feel gratitude for having found my place in this story.
Note Halevi’s description of the Jews as a “strange little people.” According to the Bible, that is accurate. “Not because of your size did God love you,” we are informed in Deuteronomy, “for ye are the smallest of the nations.” We are, you might say, dwarfed by other peoples. And we are, until this day, chosen by God.
At the end of The Hobbit, the dwarves have returned to their mountain, the throne of the dwarf kingdom has been reestablished, and Gandalf tells Bilbo of the glory that now surrounds the miraculous mountaintop. Bilbo replies: “Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!” Gandalf’s response is worth quoting in its entirety.
“Of course!” said Gandalf. “And why should not they prove true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”
Tolkien was rather instructive here. For the story of the Jews is about a little people who today, and throughout time, have helped bring prophecy about. They, all too often, doubt it all the more, refusing to accept that to be a Jew means to be a part of the most miraculous story that could ever be told, a story that is not yet over.
In The Lord of the Rings, there is a poetic prophecy about a kingdom yet to be restored, and it reads as follows.
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
To which many believing Jews may instinctively say, Amein: Kein yehi ratzon, bimheirah beyameinu. Amen. So may we see it, speedily in our days.

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Netanyahu, the Almost-American
Bibi’s unique feel for the United States hasn’t always paid off
Seth Mandel 2016-08-16
n early 1991, as Saddam Hussein’s scud missiles fell near Israeli population centers, Israelis donned gas masks and retreated to bomb shelters. The air-warning siren sounded one evening while CNN’s Linda Scherzer was ready to broadcast. The crew, Scherzer included, put on their masks. So did the Israeli official Scherzer was about to interview. Viewers might have expected him to be unintelligible: a thick accent, broken English, the usual. But this official was decidedly unusual, speaking in flawless, idiomatic, virtually accentless English delivered with poise. It should have been tedious television, but instead it was utterly compelling, thanks to the Israeli in the studio—Benjamin Netanyahu.
The CNN interview was vintage Bibi: his American-ness, his flair for the dramatic, his utility as a spokesman for Israeli hopes and fears, his ability with Western audiences. But these characteristics explain something else about him: They are also largely responsible for Netanyahu’s successful career in Israeli politics. He isn’t American-born, but he is, in many ways, American-made—the most American politician in the world outside the United States. And yet, despite this fact, he has had a rocky relationship with American presidents, very much including Bill Clinton. With Clinton’s wife the favorite to win November’s election and become the next U.S. president at a moment of great peril and great promise for Israel, Netanyahu’s four-decade history of political conflict with American administrations is worth study.
Benjamin Netanyahu is the first Israeli prime minister to have been born in the State of Israel. When he was eight years old, his academic father was offered a teaching job in New York and the family moved to Manhattan. Two years later, the family returned to Jerusalem. Three years after that, the Netanyahus returned to the States just outside Philadelphia, where Bibi went to high school.
Benjamin returned to Israel for his military service, and was recruited to join the same elite reconnaissance unit in which his brother Yonatan served. When he was released, Bibi moved to Boston with his first wife, Micki, and attended MIT. He fought with the IDF in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, returned to MIT to finish his studies, joining the Boston Consulting Group after college, and then took a position with the Israeli furniture company Rim in 1978.
In 1976, his brother Yonatan was killed during the raid on Entebbe Airport in which their unit, Sayeret Matkal, rescued 103 hostages. Yoni’s heroism electrified the nation, and even as Benjamin was learning the furniture business, he created an institute in his brother’s honor to study the threat of terrorism. The Jonathan Institute was inaugurated with an ambitious conference in 1979 featuring political dignitaries and politicians from around the world. The conference was a triumph and launched Benjamin’s political career.
In 1982, the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., began looking for a replacement for the outgoing political attaché, and Netanyahu got the job. The timing was propitious, because Israel would go to war in southern Lebanon that year and desperately needed any and all eloquent defenders of the country’s actions to speak to the foreign press.
Netanyahu studied hard. Every weekend, he and his second wife, Fleur, rented several TV cameras and a spotlight, and Fleur would practice grilling Bibi over the day’s news. They would run the tapes back like boxers or football coaches and then do another interview. “Compared to other diplomats, Bibi Netanyahu was like a breath of fresh air,” write Netanyahu biographers Ben Caspit and Ilan Kfir. “He spoke to the Americans in their own language, using expressions from the world of sports and the college campus. And he was always smiling.”
Netanyahu cultivated friendships with media executives and star anchors. He refined and beefed up the Israeli Embassy’s PR shop. And as the Reagan administration’s pressure on Prime Minister Menachem Begin increased, so did Bibi’s aggressive defense of Israel’s actions. One example: After one Israeli offensive, a picture began circulating in the media of a young injured Lebanese girl. Netanyahu could tell the picture was a forgery and investigated. He found the girl: Her injury had happened years earlier, during the Lebanese civil war. Netanyahu was spotting libels and had the standing and connections to debunk them, which took some pressure off Begin.
Netanyahu’s efforts, however, were not without missteps of a kind he would repeat. Moshe Arens, the ambassador, wanted Bibi on TV and in the press whenever possible. But Netanyahu got a bit too comfortable criticizing the Reagan administration for Arens’s taste, and he worried his superiors by going around Reagan to build support for Israel’s position among members of Congress—a practice that would come under scrutiny again when Bibi fought against the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran 33 years later.
As the Reagan administration’s pressure on Begin increased, so did Bibi’s aggressive defense of Israel. Netanyahu’s efforts, however, were not without missteps.Netanyahu’s linguistic abilities helped in other ways, too. George P. Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state, remembers using him to convey messages to the Israeli government when precise wording—in Hebrew and English—was essential. On June 14, 1985, TWA Flight 847 was hijacked by terrorists whose demands included Israel’s releasing Shiite prisoners. As Shultz writes in his memoir, the Reagan administration didn’t want to be seen trading prisoners with terrorists, and U.S. officials were even less comfortable asking Israel to do so. But still, the “trade” would have to be done, somehow. Shultz writes that “precision” was his “guideline.” He contacted Netanyahu and phrased the question to be relayed to Prime Minister Shimon Peres thus: “What can we expect Israel to do about all the Ansar [Shiite] prisoners on the assumption that there are no TWA 847 hostages being held?”
The press oversimplified and misreported what was agreed to. Shultz again called Netanyahu to clear the air. Eventually the complex hostage crisis was resolved, but not before it gave another boost to Netanyahu’s dealings with America: the U.S. security establishment’s recognition that defeating terrorism would require a global effort that also targeted and pressured the terrorists’ state sponsors.
In truth, the seeds of anti-terrorism were planted earlier and cultivated by Netanyahu. In 1983, Shultz revealed to Netanyahu that he and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger were at odds over the value of a global war on terror; Shultz was in favor. Terrorism experts are a dime a dozen today, but in 1983 Netanyahu was one of the few, owing to his work with the Jonathan Institute. Netanyahu told Shultz terrorism could be defeated by resisting terrorists’ demands and by being ready to, as Caspit and Kfir put it, “fight countries which support and protect terrorism.”
Netanyahu organized a second conference, at which Shultz was one of the featured speakers. Two years later, during the negotiations over TWA 847, Shultz began winning his internal battle with Weinberger and was convincing Ronald Reagan that tougher action against terrorism was required. The National Security Council produced a timeline of steps to take against the terrorists. Among those steps was “declaring war on terrorism,” and another was, in Shultz’s words, expanding that fight to “any nation that used its state apparatus to support terrorism”—as Netanyahu had recommended to Shultz.
Netanyahu’s turn toward domestic politics happened prior to the 1988 Knesset elections, when he—by then a star of the right—joined the Likud slate. Arens became foreign minister and made Netanyahu a deputy, putting the band back together, this time to tackle the emerging Palestinian peace track. And there he was, back on American television screens.
“Why, though, is having this state of almost civil war any better than having a Palestinian entity on your border, where they’re involved with organizing their own community?” Lesley Stahl asked Netanyahu in 1988 on Face the Nation.
“Lesley,” he replied, “we’ve experienced what happened when these territories were in Arab hands, and in fact when the PLO was there in these very territories before the 1967 war. What they used it for is to launch a war of extermination against Israel.” Bibi closed his comments with a typical American flourish: “If you want to move toward peace, you’re going to wait a long time until this PLO leopard changes its spots.”
The U.S.-Israel relationship took a turn for the better under Reagan so significant that it counts as a realignment. That relationship took more than one or two steps back during the one term of Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush.
IN 1989, the Bush White House was trying to organize multiparty peace talks, but no one could seem to agree on who could or should represent the Palestinians at the table. When it finally looked as if the question had been satisfactorily answered, Secretary of State James Baker testified to the Senate that he supported conditioning U.S. loan guarantees to Israel on the latter’s willingness to freeze settlements. Two days later, President Bush criticized building Jewish housing in East Jerusalem. Just like that, the process was on ice.
Netanyahu publicly accused the Bush administration of dishonesty, and Baker banned him from his presence for the rest of the term. He seemed proud of his decision, too: “Even after [Netanyahu] wrote me claiming to have been misunderstood, I wouldn’t see him for the rest of my tenure, although I rescinded the ban against his seeing others in the building,” Baker writes in his memoirs. What Baker glosses over is how willing the White House was to facilitate the breakup of the governing coalition led by Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir and let the government fall in hopes of a more compliant Labor-led coalition.
The Bush administration was enraged by Shamir’s intractability as it began a peace process that was to be inaugurated with a conference in Madrid in 1991. Throughout the Madrid process, Netanyahu served as deputy foreign minister and was a point man at press conferences about the process. He was a fixture on American television, and his defense of his government’s refusal to bow to international demands infuriated Bush and Baker still more.
In the wake of the Madrid process’s failure, the complex coalition led by the Likud government fell, which opened the space for Netanyahu to elbow his way to party leadership—just as Bill Clinton defeated Bush in the 1992 presidential election.
The retrospective irony of the 1992 election was that Netanyahu surely preferred Clinton to Bush. Indeed, Clinton later told historian Taylor Branch that he was certain Netanyahu wanted him to win. But Netanyahu’s preferences were of no moment. Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor Party won the new elections, and the peace process resumed. Bibi was relegated to the sidelines in the opposition. Clinton and Rabin ramped up the peace process, and the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993 on the White House lawn by Rabin and PLO chair Yasir Arafat—and when an assassin’s bullet killed Rabin in November 1995, Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, called early elections against Netanyahu’s Likud. And because Rabin had been murdered by a right-wing extremist, the Israeli and American left treated Netanyahu’s party as an accomplice.
The conventional wisdom about Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister is that he was uncooperative in advancing peace. This is impossible to square with the reality.Washington sought unambiguously to ensure Peres’s victory in the 1996 elections. Peres was treated to a pre-election visit at the White House in which, in veteran peace processor Dennis Ross’s words, “we all but endorsed him.” On the eve of the election, Clinton gave a speech in which he appealed to Israeli voters essentially to choose Peres. The Clinton team’s justification for this was shocking: Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel who could not then and cannot now contain his anti-diplomatic loathing of Netanyahu, compared it to Clinton’s helping “[Boris] Yeltsin’s reelection bid in Russia”—as if a Labor loss was equivalent to Yeltsin’s losing power to revanchist Communist elements during Moscow’s post-Soviet transition to a fragile democracy.
It was a gamble the president lost when Netanyahu squeaked out a narrow victory. It is important to note that Bibi did not run on a platform or promise of undoing Oslo, but he expressed profound skepticism about Yasir Arafat’s true intentions. The conventional wisdom about Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 is that he was obstinate and uncooperative in advancing peace. This is impossible to square with the reality.
Netanyahu is no right-wing ideologue, and both Clinton and Dennis Ross, who took the lead on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, understood this. Clinton’s dislike of Netanyahu once in office largely stemmed from Bibi’s propensity to lecture. After their first meeting, Clinton said, “He thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do whatever he requires.”
But in terms of policy, Netanyahu is a pragmatist, which Clinton recognized. Bibi (in Branch’s paraphrasing) “wanted badly to maneuver against ‘crazies’ within his own coalition,” Clinton told Branch. “Netanyahu complained constantly that General Ariel Sharon forced his way into the cabinet, for instance, and had made nothing but trouble since, dreaming of an Israeli settlement on every corner in the West Bank.”
It is also true that Netanyahu repeatedly flattened himself into the caricature drawn of him. In return for restarting negotiations, Bibi wanted to throw a bone to his restive right flank. He did so by expanding Jewish building in Jerusalem and by opening the Hasmonean tunnel, an underground passageway that made it possible to enter the Kotel tunnel (underneath the Western Wall), walk through the Hasmonean tunnel, and exit in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. The Palestinians threw a fit, Clinton called a summit, and the pressure was back on Bibi to produce some positive step.
To do so, the parties turned to Hebron, an ancient Jewish holy city and the site of the Cave of the Patriarchs. It was also the major city in the West Bank from which the IDF had not yet redeployed to make way for Palestinian stewardship. At first, Netanyahu was almost too eager to make progress with the Palestinians. One of his weaknesses was showing through: He liked to alternate between placating his right wing and mollifying the peace camp. Thus he telegraphed his moves and thereby became easier for both sides to manipulate. When Arafat sensed Netanyahu needed to have something to show on the peace front, he would hold back.
One way Ross found to make progress was to have dual-track talks: a high-level, public channel and a back channel. When the back channel made enough progress, the Israeli and Palestinian leadership would take the baton. More than once Ross had to stop Netanyahu from trying to use his own cabinet’s pressure as a means of getting Arafat to move the ball forward; Ross understood Arafat had no intention of aiding Netanyahu domestically. The Palestinian sought only to take advantage of his rival’s perceived political weakness.
Ross and Netanyahu often disagreed on policy, but Netanyahu trusted Ross. He didn’t necessarily need like-minded counterparts in Washington, but he did need interlocutors who would be straight with him and hold up their end of any bargain. Americans have persistently misunderstood this because, unlike Ross, they do not try to understand the complexities of Israeli politics and instead insist on seeing it in the frame of our own. Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state during Clinton’s second term, is a perfect example. Here is Albright’s description of Netanyahu upon taking office as secretary of state: “Pugnacious, partisan, and very smooth, he reminded me of Newt Gingrich.” Preposterously, she was determined to see him as a Republican instead of as the head of the party of a rambunctious democratic ally.
One of the most important things to understand about Bibi is that he fears the right wing precisely because he isn’t really one of them. In spirit and interest, he is far closer to the Labor elite whose political stance he admittedly reviles. And though he has been one of the two dominant figures on the Israeli right for the past quarter-century, he actually came to power twice by outmaneuvering the Likud Party “princes” (as they were called), who have remained thorns in his side forever. He doesn’t care nearly as much about satisfying the right wing as he does about silencing them. That is a big difference.
And it is a difference too many American officials have never grasped. When the Hebron negotiations hit a rough patch—Palestinian terrorism followed by Israeli construction—Albright apparently raised the astounding possibility of announcing publicly that the U.S. “could not work with” Netanyahu, according to Ross. Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Ross said, “feared that Bibi was deliberately trying to destroy the Oslo process.”
Instead of such histrionics, it would have been more useful for these foreign-policy experts to understand that when external events—terrorism on the one side, coalition maneuvering on the other—intrude, it’s a sign that those external forces should be dealt with. Indeed, this is what diplomats are supposed to understand about the countries they deal with; it’s why diplomats exist in the first place.
The United States should have known then and should know now that an Israeli prime minister must respond to acts of terrorism and cannot reward them with concessions; it is the sine qua non of leadership in Israel. And American officials should know that only by bringing pressure to bear on the Palestinians to halt terrorism and the incitement that drives the violence, can Israeli leaders have the freedom to move on the peace track.
Despite all this, Netanyahu and Arafat eventually came to agreements on Hebron in 1997 and 1998. And yet, when Netanyahu’s government started to fall apart in 1999, Team Clinton was gleeful. Clinton was angered when Netanyahu did not agree to new concessions at the Wye Plantation negotiations in 1998; Bibi told Clinton he needed a face-saving concession in the form of the release of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, and Clinton could not assent.
New elections were called and Clinton once again put his thumb on the scales against Netanyahu. The administration didn’t even try to hide it, as this quote that one White House official gave to the New York Times revealed: “Officially, our position is that Israel is a sovereign country, we don’t meddle in its internal affairs, blah, blah, blah.” Three of Clinton’s top election strategists—Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Bob Shrum—went over to help Labor’s Ehud Barak win.
He did. But the intifada that erupted at the inevitable end of the Oslo process delivered the government back into Likud’s hands within two years. But not into Netanyahu’s. Chastened by his defeat, he took a brief pause from electoral politics and saw Ariel Sharon put down the intifada. He roared back into public life in opposition to Sharon’s plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and Sharon was forced to abandon Likud to form a new Kadima Party rather than be voted out of leadership. Netanyahu then took his party back.
Four years later, just as Barack Obama was getting settled into the White House in 2009, Likud lost national elections to Kadima. But Netanyahu outmaneuvered Kadima leader Tzipi Livni to form a governing coalition, and he was prime minister once again. To say this isn’t what Obama wanted would be the understatement of the new millennium. Since 2009, the Obama-Bibi relationship has been studied and discussed and analyzed to the point of exhaustion. Now the page is turning on Obama’s time, but not on his Israeli counterpart’s. What lessons can be drawn from the painful history of the most American of Israeli prime ministers and the hostility shown him by the American administrations he has dealt with as a leader?
The lesson for Netanyahu is to disabuse himself of the fantasy he can ever be enough of an expert on American politics to outwit the president on his or her home court. No Israeli—no foreign leader, for that matter—knows America the way Bibi does. But by definition, any American president has a better feel for the U.S. electorate and a superior understanding of the minutiae of political operation than virtually anyone else save his living predecessors.
Netanyahu’s repeated attempts to find leverage against Obama were understandable but in retrospect doomed to failure, as we saw in his effort to run rings around Obama on the Iran deal—specifically by addressing a joint session of Congress that took on Obama on his home turf and was aimed at turning members of Obama’s own party against him. That Netanyahu was right on the merits doesn’t mean he was right on the optics, and the whole business demonstrated not a deep understanding of American politics but an odd naiveté about the way things work here. Bibi is a parliamentary politician and he imagined he could use America’s parliament against Obama. But America doesn’t have a parliament.
The lesson for Obama’s successor is twofold. First make sure there is someone—anyone—high up in the administration who can serve as what might be called the “trust valve.” During Begin’s premiership, Netanyahu saw the acrimony that resulted from the various challenges to the relationship, especially the war in Lebanon. But what he also probably noticed was that while Reagan’s cabinet, especially in his first term, was ill-disposed toward Begin, Reagan himself was not.
Each time a crisis seemed to be developing, Begin found that Reagan listened to his side of the story and, at times, even instinctively trusted the Israeli over his own advisers. Reagan’s reservoir of sympathy for Israel was key to ensuring the relationship didn’t crash and burn after the war in Lebanon.
During Bill Clinton’s administration, the trust valve was Dennis Ross, with whom Netanyahu speaks freely. During the Obama administration, there was no such valve. Obama had no personal relationship with Netanyahu, and neither did his advisors. His Mideast envoy was Martin Indyk, who openly loathes Netanyahu. And Obama’s national-security aides constantly badmouthed the Israeli leader. One called him “a chickens–t” to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg; National Security Adviser Susan Rice talked to Anti-Defamation League leader Abe Foxman about Netanyahu’s supposed racism. Under Obama, there was nobody to talk to. There must be somebody to talk to.
The other major lesson is not to play into Netanyahu’s fears about foreign interference. Obama meddled throughout Bibi’s first term in his latest premiership, trying to destabilize the governing coalition and elevate Tzipi Livni in his place. Then he tried to ensure Netanyahu didn’t get a second consecutive term.
Obama unnecessarily put Netanyahu in impossible situations with his own coalition, for example by demanding an unprecedented settlement freeze that forbade building for “natural growth” and in Jerusalem. And Obama refused to put pressure on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to stop the officially sanctioned incitement that led to terror sprees and disempowered both leaders by making them subservient to events.
Trying to weaken the Israeli prime minister when he obviously needs broad public support to make sacrifices and concessions for peace is self-destructive. Doing so to Netanyahu, who has been the target of such rash behavior literally every time he has been elected prime minister and who is therefore both sensitive to it and adept at countering it, is a recipe for disaster.
If Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition hangs on and Hillary Clinton retains her lead in the polls and beats Donald Trump, it will be a testament to their survival instincts. They have been central players in the fates of their respective countries for decades. Let’s hope they’ve learned something.

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Bibi the Strategist
A close look at Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy reveals an underappreciated and misunderstood record of accomplishment
Lazar Berman 2016-08-16
n June, the Israeli journalist Amir Tibon wrote an article for Politico detailing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-standing and bitter fights with Israel’s defense leaders. Former IDF chiefs of staff and spymasters described Netanyahu as messianic, driven by personal calculations, and incapable of protecting Israel’s interests. His former defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said the prime minister’s conduct had caused him to lose faith in Netanyahu, and ex- Shin Bet Chief Yuval Diskin said he “represents six years of constant failures.”
Bibi-bashing of this sort is neither new nor limited to Israel. Diskin’s remarks echoed the charges of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who wrote in his 2014 memoir, Duty, that under Netanyahu “Israel’s strategic situation is worsening, its own actions contributing to its isolation.” Gates claimed that the Jewish state was acting “strategically stupid” as it pursued tactical gains. “Time,” he concluded, “is not on Israel’s side.”
Messianism and stupidity are as bad a combination as one could find in a nation’s leader. What, then, might Diskin and Gates have made of the accord Netanyahu reached with Turkey right around the time the Politico piece appeared? Six years after Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Israel and took to obsessively condemning the Jewish state, Netanyahu got Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to drop his key demands and agree to resume full diplomatic relations with Israel. That victory for Netanyahu’s statecraft is one example of many that highlight an enduring contradiction between his reputation for ineptitude and his record of achievement. And considering what Israel is up against, almost any foreign-policy success would be noteworthy.
Since Netanyahu regained the premiership in 2009, Israel has faced a multitude of challenges—from Turkey’s hostile turn, to Iran’s nuclear program, to Hamas’s cross-border tunnels, to rocket attacks on civilians, to a rash of terrorist knifings and automobile attacks. Any one of them would try the sharpest strategic thinkers. What’s more, Egypt and Syria both collapsed into turmoil during his time in office. The civil war in Syria turned Israel’s quietest border into an ungoverned zone filled by rival jihadist groups. The fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt meant that a Muslim Brotherhood government temporarily bordered the Gaza Strip and could give aid to its Palestinian faction, Hamas. And while Egypt’s current leader, Abdel-Fattah Al-Sissi has since fought Hamas aggressively, the Sinai Peninsula has become an ungoverned home to terrorists who pledge allegiance to ISIS.
Then there’s the United States. With the election of Barack Obama, America’s approach to the Middle East changed in drastic ways. Determined to build bridges to the Muslim world, Obama saw Israeli settlements as the central obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. Thus, he instituted a policy of maintaining “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem in hopes of wearing down Israel’s supposed obstinacy on settlements. To make matters worse, Obama and his advisers evinced a strong animus against Netanyahu that only escalated as time progressed.
After the Mavi Marmara incident, the flotilla problem was expected to grow, but Israel used diplomacy, espionage, and other tools to nullify the threat.Washington scaled back its influence at the same moment that Sunni–Shia, tribal, and ethnic battles began gutting Arab states. Iran capitalized on the resulting power vacuum to expand its reach in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond. As for Iran’s nuclear program, Obama and the Islamic Republic entered into the P5+1 Joint Plan of Action. What’s become known simply as “the Iran deal” has both enriched and rehabilitated the regime while leaving its nuclear program largely intact and free from serious scrutiny.
How has Netanyahu handled this dizzying constellation of threats? Although far from perfect, he has shown himself to be a careful thinker, a leader whose reading of complex situations has allowed him to outmaneuver adversaries and protect Israel’s interests. The growing threat from Hamas and the dangers of a rising Iran have not abated. But in reviewing Netanyahu’s actions as prime minister, we emerge with a list of improbable foreign-policy accomplishments of which most world leaders would be proud.
The Border with Syria
Problems generated by the Syrian civil war have exploded outward in every direction. To name a few: Refugees have spilled over into Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Europe. Terrorist groups inside Syria, especially ISIS, pose a strategic threat to Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. Additionally, ISIS continues to carry out major terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe.
Yet Israel, on Syria’s western border, remains effectively out of the fray.
Although Syria was long an enemy of Israel, its collapse posed a major strategic challenge for Israeli leaders. Before Syria spiraled out of control, Israel had hoped for (and repeatedly tried to attain) a peace agreement with Damascus. With the Syrian state in chaos, this was no longer even a remote possibility. And with ISIS taking the lead in the fight against Assad, it was clear that Israel couldn’t support either side. In any event, Israel had to deal with more immediate threats emerging from the meltdown. Some of the terrorist groups fighting Assad—including the Al-Nusra Front and the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade—had gained a foothold along Israel’s Golan Heights border with Syria.
There were (and are) still more complicating factors. Mortar fire from the conflict occasionally strays into Israel. Druze residents of the Israeli Golan Heights maintain close ties to family members and other co-religionists on the Syrian side and have vowed to take action if jihadist groups threaten Syrian Druze. And Hezbollah and Iran have tried to take advantage of the chaos to open a new front against Israel in the Golan.
Through it all, Israel has stayed safe. Netanyahu has been quietly shaping the situation to protect his country’s interests. Israel has reached a stable—and officially unconfirmed—understanding with rebel groups on its border. These groups, including some jihadist factions, know they don’t have to protect their western flank from Israel. In return, they refrain from attacking Israel and keep others from doing so as well. In coordination with IDF forces on the border, rebel groups hand over wounded fighters and civilians to be treated in Israeli hospitals. Israel has also transferred aid to these groups, but it is unclear if this goes beyond food and medicine. There is likely intelligence sharing as well.
Israel is also involved in protecting threatened Druze communities in Syria. “The State of Israel is acting on behalf of the Syrian Druze. These matters are being carried out quietly, and without publicity,” said Israeli Druze lawmaker Ayoub Kara in 2015. It’s not known whether this assistance includes a military component.
When Russian forces entered the fight in September 2015 in support of Assad, new difficulties arose. While Turkey made an enemy out of Putin by downing a Russian plane that had strayed toward its airspace, Israel refrained from firing on the two occasions Russian jets flew over Israel. Top-level Israeli military and political leaders coordinate with their Russian counterparts to make sure Israel and Russia don’t fire on each other.
Notably, however, Netanyahu has failed to convince the Russians to keep advanced missiles out of Hezbollah hands. Hezbollah and Iran are doing all they can to strengthen their posture against Israel while Syria bleeds. The advanced Russian weapons given to Hezbollah include anti-tank missiles, ground-to-ground rockets, and radar systems. Though Israel has not been able to stop Russian shipments to Iran and Syria, it has been bombing weapons convoys heading into Lebanon without inviting reprisals from Hezbollah, Syria, or Iran.
Israel’s air force also interfered with Hezbollah’s plan to threaten Israel from the Golan Heights. On January 18, 2015, Israeli jets struck a convoy moving through the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, killing six Hezbollah men and an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps general. One of the Hezbollah dead was the son of senior member Imad Mughniyeh. The convoy was reportedly part of a joint Iran/Hezbollah effort to develop a new unit that would kidnap Israelis, fire rockets, and attack soldiers. But Hezbollah made do with one attack on an IDF vehicle, killing an officer and a soldier. While Hezbollah continued to talk tough, that was the extent of its response.
Turkey
In May 2010, Israel committed what seemed to be a catastrophic blunder. As part of a campaign to weaken Israel’s blockade on Gaza, a Turkish NGO organized a flotilla in hopes of either reaching the coastal strip or forcing Israel into an embarrassing mistake. IDF naval commandoes succeeded in stopping the flotilla. But a group of activists on one ship, the Mavi Marmara, set upon the soldiers with stockpiled knives and pipes. In the ensuing struggle, nine Turkish activists were killed and ten Israeli commandoes wounded. World reaction came down hard. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s condemnation was emblematic: “Let me be clear: the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable.”
Relations with Turkey, already tense, deteriorated. Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador and recalled its own. It threatened to deploy its navy to accompany future flotillas and to prevent Israeli “exploitation” of natural gas in the Mediterranean. Both sides flexed their muscles, with Israeli jets allegedly approaching Turkish naval forces and Turkish ships sailing provocatively close to Israeli waters.
Yet after the Mavi Marmara incident, the flotilla problem, expected to get worse, dissipated. Under Netanyahu, Israel used diplomacy, espionage, and appeals to international law to nullify the threat. When the NGO organized another flotilla in 2011, it never got out of port. Israel managed to create deep and broad international opposition to the campaign. Parties ranging from the UN and the Middle East Quartet to France and Canada came out against the planned voyage. Even Turkey’s foreign minister said that organizers should reconsider their plans. The Obama administration reportedly tried to convince Turkey to stop the flotilla in exchange for a Middle East peace conference hosted by Ankara.
Other measures also had an effect. Some of the vessels were damaged in port (Israel denied involvement). The Greek government, in whose ports most of the ships were docked, forbade the ships from leaving. Some boats tested the ban and were arrested by Greek authorities. Israeli NGOs waged legal war against the flotilla, warning insurance companies that they could be held responsible for terrorist attacks involving any cargo carried by the ships.
Israel easily intercepted the one vessel that managed to sail toward its waters, with no violence or international opprobrium. A subsequent flotilla attempt in 2015 was also intercepted by Israel with no cost in blood or diplomatic standing. Israel even prepared flyers for the participants that read: “Perhaps you meant to sail somewhere else nearby—Syria, where Assad’s regime is massacring his people every day, with the support of the murderous Iranian regime.” Through it all, Israel never backed down from its red lines, showing that Jerusalem would enforce the blockade.
Netanyahu has since developed a strategic partnership with Turkey’s rivals, Greece and Cyprus. The relationship has led to massive Israeli and Cypriot natural-gas discoveries. A proposed “East Med Pipeline” would link Israel, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy, and the Bulgarian government has also thrown in its support. Not insignificantly, the project would bypass Turkey, foiling its ambitions to become the natural-gas hub for Europe. The rebalance has also produced fruitful military partnerships. In 2013, Israel’s air force joined its American, Greek, and Italian counterparts in Israel’s largest-ever multinational air-war training maneuvers. Cancelled joint maneuvers between Israel and Turkey were quickly replaced by exercises between the American, Israeli, and Hellenic navies. Cyprus joined in search-and rescue-exercises in 2014.
Netanyahu, however, always kept the restoration of ties with Turkey as a strategic goal. In 2013, Obama arranged a telephone call between Netanyahu and Erdogan. The Israeli PM apologized “for any errors that could have led to loss of life” in the Mavi Marmara raid. The two leaders came to terms on compensation. Erdogan walked back comments criticizing Israel and agreed not to prosecute Israeli officials for their part in the incident. And Netanyahu won on his major strategic concern: The Gaza blockade would remain firmly in place.
Ultimately a bumbling Turkey, not Israel, would become isolated. In 2016, Turkish officials looking for a new source of natural gas in the wake of tensions with Russia sat down to talks with the Israelis. On June 29, Israel approved the reconciliation agreement. Israel agreed to pay $20 million to the families of those killed on the Mavi Marmara. The renewed ties have weathered their first challenge, as Erdogan passed on an opportunity to implicate Israel in the recent failed coup in Turkey.
Not surprisingly, Netanyahu received bitter criticism about the deal. “Netanyahu cares for Gaza and not for our soldiers,” said Zahava Shaul, whose son Oron was killed in Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, his body still held by Hamas. “Netanyahu has not kept his promises.” He had a particularly rough time with politicians on his right. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said that the deal would have “bad consequences.” Education Minister Naftali Bennett said the deal harms Israel’s resilience and national honor.
Netanyahu, knowing such attacks would come, maintained that it was in Israel’s strategic interest to resume ties with a powerful Muslim state from a position of strength. He took the long view and never wavered.
Sunni Neighbors
Despite the conflagrations in the region, Israel’s ties with Sunni Arab states have generally grown stronger with Netanyahu in office. Shared concerns over Iran’s nuclear program and growing strength have paved the way for quiet but effective cooperation.
In Saudi Arabia, Iran’s most potent Arab foe, Israel sees a counterweight. Jerusalem has therefore offered greater leeway to the Saudis on various defense and strategic matters. In 2011, Israel gave the green light to Germany for the sale of Leopard 2 tanks to Riyadh. And when Egypt wanted to hand over the strategic Red Sea islands of Tiran and the Sanafir Islands to Saudi Arabia, Israel registered no objection, noting that it had received written assurances from Riyadh that its freedom of passage would be guaranteed. In July, a retired Saudi general and ex-government adviser visited Israel publicly and met with Knesset members and senior Foreign Ministry officials.
Since the Israeli victory in the Second Intifada, Palestinians outside of Gaza have not been able to threaten the State of Israel in any serious way.Israel’s relations with Sissi’s Egypt have similarly grown warmer, after the brief but dangerous rule of Mohammed Morsi. Israel’s Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan has in fact called recent intelligence cooperation between the two countries “unprecedented.” In 2011 and 2013, Netanyahu assented to an increase in Egyptian troops in the Sinai to combat jihadist forces. When Egyptian jets violated Israeli airspace in 2015, defense officials dismissed it as “minor.” For the first time ever, Egypt voted for Israel at the UN, supporting its membership in a committee on outer space. Cairo returned its envoy to Israel in February 2016, filling a vacancy that had lingered since 2012 when an Israeli airstrike killed top Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari at the outset of Operation Pillar of Defense. In July 2016, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry came to Israel for a rare and cordial public visit and even watched the Euro soccer final with Netanyahu.
Israel’s security and economic relationship with its eastern neighbor, Jordan, has continued on relatively sure footing. In December 2015, the two countries unveiled an $800 million plan to build a canal to save the Dead Sea. A month earlier, Israel’s Interior Ministry initiated a program to bring 1,500 Jordanian citizens to work in hotels in Eilat. Israel’s gas finds have also led to economic cooperation. In April 2015, Netanyahu approved a 15-year, $500 million natural-gas deal with Jordan, though lawmakers in Amman are working to get the deal cancelled.
Israeli and Jordanian pilots trained together over Alaska during a military exercise in the summer of 2015. Israel also gave Jordanian military 16 Cobra helicopters to help in its fight against the Islamic State. And the two countries maintain close intelligence ties, especially regarding terrorist groups in Syria.
It’s worth noting that in late 2015, Israel announced plans to open a diplomatic office in a renewable-energy agency in the United Arab Emirates, Israel’s first diplomatic presence in the Persian Gulf region since 2000.
Africa
In July 2016, Netanyahu returned from a resoundingly successful tour of Africa. The trip highlighted growing relationships that had previously passed below the media radar. Netanyahu walked away from the trip with real accomplishments. Ethiopia and Kenya publicly supported restoring Israel’s observer status at the African Union, which had ended in 2002. Muslim-majority Guinea renewed ties with Israel that had been suspended since 1967. Finally, Tanzania said it planned to open an embassy in Israel.
In strengthening these ties, Netanyahu sees an opportunity to gain allies and shatter the Palestinians’ automatic majority in international fora. “It might take a decade, but we will change the automatic majority against Israel. That’s something that has never been possible in the past,” he said. A lofty goal, perhaps even too ambitious, but it shows his interest in original solutions in dealing with the Palestinians.
Palestinians
A long-term peace deal with the Palestinians is simply not in the offing. Until Palestinian leadership has more to gain from recognizing Israel’s right to exist than it does from claiming victimhood, a lasting peaceful solution is a dream. Thus the problem remains unsolved, with all that entails: rockets, terrorism, lawfare, and international condemnation.
On the other hand, since the Israeli victory in the Second Intifada, Palestinians outside of Gaza have not been able to threaten the State of Israel in any serious way. Periodic outbreaks of violence (some recently in the West Bank) inevitably lead commentators to warn that the third intifada has arrived, but these episodes fail to gain widespread support. Nor do the attacks change anything for the Palestinians. As ghastly as all the attacks are, they are strategically ineffective.
The Palestinian Authority’s major effort against Israel has taken place in international bodies, and while this causes headaches, it has failed to change anything on the ground. Initiatives hailed as game changers have raised expectations without much to show for it. The Palestinian plan to gain full recognition as a UN member state, for example, ran into opposition from Western leaders, and stalled. PA President Mahmoud Abbas succeeded in gaining recognition only as a non-member observer state. The “diplomatic tsunami” Israel was supposed to face never materialized.
The PA continues to try to get a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Israel withdraw from the West Bank, but the United States has proven reliable in threatening a veto. In December 2014, when a vote came up, two of the 15 UNSC members voted no and another five abstained—preempting a U.S. veto entirely. Abbas’s UN speech in September 2015, in which he promised to drop a “bombshell,” contained nothing of the sort. As usual, he warned that the Palestinians would withdraw from agreements with Israel and declared that Palestine was a state under occupation. In April of that year, the PA made good on its threat to join the International Criminal Court, but even Palestinians understood there would be no action against Israel. “I don’t want to disappoint our people, but the ICC procedures are slow and long and might face lots of obstacles and challenges and might take years,” said PA Foreign Minister Riad Malki. In the meantime, Abbas’s approval plummeted; it reached 16 percent in 2015.
Palestinians have lost faith in their national movement. Young Palestinians who attack Israelis “are battling … the growing Palestinian realization that their national movement has no answers, no narrative or political vision that offers a way forward to better days,” writes the Times of Israel’s Haviv Rettig Gur. “These young killers are striving, in their kamikaze fervor, to rekindle the idea among Palestinians that straightforward victory remains possible, if only because the alternative—the possibility that Israel cannot be dislodged, that the nostalgic vision of an undivided, unfettered Palestine cannot be reclaimed—is simply too monstrous to accept.”
But in Gaza, the menace of Hamas continues to grow even in the face of Israeli operations meant to damage the group and restore deterrence. The organization’s willingness to fight Israel every few years shows that Israel has not been able to deter it for long. What’s more, Hamas comes back improved in every round. It has developed the Nuhba Force, several thousand strong, to carry out raids through tunnel networks into Israeli territory. In 2014, Hamas forces killed 66 soldiers during Operation Protective Edge. It even managed to shut down international traffic into Ben Gurion Airport for a day. The range of Hamas’s rockets is expanding, and now it’s able to threaten Tel Aviv and Jerusalem almost at will.
Iran
Hamas isn’t the only threat that Netanyahu has failed to stymie. Despite years of effort, he was powerless to prevent the P5+1 powers from concluding an Iranian nuclear deal in 2015. Netanyahu was the most vocal world leader opposing the deal, and he was willing to let the already cold relationship with Obama get worse as he pressed his case. He made a series of high-profile speeches condemning the deal, including a controversial March 2015 address to a joint meeting in Congress, against the wishes of the White House and most of the Democratic Party. It was all to no avail.
There were some bright spots in the campaign against Iran. Somebody—many think the Israelis—orchestrated a series of assassinations against Iranian nuclear scientists. The Stuxnet computer virus, allegedly jointly developed by Israel and the United States, wreaked havoc on Iranian computers at the Natanz uranium facility in 2009 and 2010.
Yet, the dangerous deal is now a reality. Since it was reached, Iran has enjoyed the release of billions of dollars in frozen assets, encouraged by the United States. America is even buying millions of dollars’ worth of heavy water from Iran. The country’s nuclear program remains a threat.
With two major exceptions, Hamas and Iran, Israel has been on a successful foreign-policy streak under Netanyahu. How has it managed to navigate flotillas, wars on its borders, tensions with powerful former allies, and terrorist threats? For one, its leadership has shown patience—something not traditionally seen as an Israeli strength. Decision-makers have not run after solutions that aren’t there. They have been comfortable letting situations emerge, showing a confidence that policy will be flexible enough to change with events. Netanyahu didn’t panic over Erdogan’s newfound hostility. He was willing to suffer insults while keeping the door open for Turkey’s return. And when the time came, Netanyahu showed diplomatic finesse.
Netanyahu has also managed to analyze complex situations and determine the country’s interests. Israel wisely chose not to pick a side between Assad and the rebels. The willingness to risk working with rebel groups on its borders and provide humanitarian aid served the country well.
Israelis are frustrated by the lack of clear military victories in Gaza. But Netanyahu has not sought to invent a solution that doesn’t exist.At the same time, Israeli policy has been firm. Netanyahu was willing to strike deep inside Syria and Lebanon to keep weapons out of Hezbollah’s hands. Rebel groups on the Golan know that if they begin attacking Israel, they will face a painful response.
What, then, about Hamas and Iran? What do these problems tell us about Netanyahu’s decisions? Though often portrayed as a warmonger, Netanyahu is extremely cautious around military campaigns. Netanyahu, recall, did whatever he could to avoid a ground incursion in Gaza in 2012. After eight days of bombing, he made significant concessions to Hamas in order to end the flare-up instead of deploying ground troops. He also sought repeated cease-fires before ordering a ground invasion in 2014. And despite massive support for an expanded push into Gaza, Netanyahu made do with a limited incursion to deal with Hamas’s tunnel network. If anything, his approach to Hamas reveals an excess of caution, not zealousness.
In dealing with Hamas, he has also shown some of the other traits mentioned above—patience, for example. The Palestinian Authority isn’t coming back any time soon, and Hamas is an entity Israel knows how to pressure. Remove Hamas and you would get the chaos of rival Islamist groups. Whether this approach is wise remains debatable. Israelis are frustrated by the lack of clear victories in Gaza. And allowing the problem to fester has made the threat worse. But, still, Netanyahu has not sought to invent a solution that doesn’t exist. Israel has maintained its blockade and even strengthened it with Egyptian support.
On Iran, Netanyahu unquestionably failed to achieve his desired outcome. Again, perhaps he was too cautious about taking action to disable Iran’s nuclear program. In any event, Obama was determined to reach a deal. So why did Netanyahu come to Washington and criticize Obama’s unstoppable policy before the U.S. Congress? As critics have noted, the speech risked alienating Democrats and damaged whatever trust remained between him and Obama. But from Netanyahu’s perspective, the vocal effort against the nuclear deal cost him little that wasn’t already lost. He angered congressional Democrats who weren’t well-disposed to him in the first place, and Obama had already decided that Netanyahu was part of the problem.
Netanyahu’s campaign against the Iran deal did reap some benefits. He showed Israelis he was willing to stand up to Obama, whom they came to see as insensitive to their concerns. Millions of Americans saw him on TV eloquently making his case in front of hundreds of applauding congressmen. And he gained credibility among Sunni Arab partners who were equally concerned about Iran’s nuclear program.
Like any leader, Netanyahu makes some decisions for domestic political gain and some for reasons that are hard to discern at all. But critics fail to appreciate the complexity of the challenges facing Israel, and how it is forced to quickly adapt to changes that render existing assumptions meaningless. Under Netanyahu, Israel has managed to stay out of wars that sucked others in, improve its diplomatic position while isolating rivals, remain flexible on policies but firm on red lines, and keep its residents safe. In the Middle East, and increasingly beyond, these are no small accomplishments.

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